I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for the self-portraits and found a room I had not expected at all. Five people round a table in a dark cottage, eating …

This is the boat. Cream hull, varnished timber window frames, lifebuoys strapped to the canopy, a Dutch flag at the bow, and along the side the registration and the capacity: twenty passengers. …

There is only one surviving portrait photograph of Vincent van Gogh. It was taken in January 1873, when he was nineteen, before he had painted anything at all. A second photograph, long …

I came up from the lake still looking for the orchids. The Wilhelmina Pavilion had turned out to be a shop, somewhere to eat and the toilets, with no floral display in …

I went in expecting a tourist trap. A restaurant inside one of the busiest museums in Europe, named after the painter, with a captive audience of two million people a year who …

I was at the Rijksmuseum for the Night Watch, like almost everybody who books a ticket. That hangs at the far end of the Gallery of Honour, upstairs, and it is where …

A few days earlier I had stood in front of the Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum and admitted that I had never understood it. I knew it was a Rembrandt. That was …

I came out of the Willem-Alexander Pavilion with a vague piece of information and no map sense whatsoever. Somebody had mentioned an orchid exhibition. I had no idea where it was, so …

I had seen this painting perhaps four hundred times before I ever saw it. On fridge magnets, on tea towels, on postcards in every souvenir shop between Centraal and the Bloemenmarkt in …

I went up on King’s Day. That is the twenty-seventh of April, the loudest day of the Dutch year, and by early afternoon the canal below the brewery was full of boats …

In Amsterdam I went looking for stroopwafels and found them, at Hans Egstorf on the Singel. What I had never done, on that trip or any other, was eat a Dutch pancake. …

I had clogs filed under souvenir. Blue and white, palm-sized, sold in every shop between Dam Square and Centraal in Amsterdam. That was the whole of my thinking on the subject until …